Most collections borrow a mood. The ten below borrow a whole story: a canto of Dante, a Bloomsbury novel, a Greek myth that's been a brand's logo for forty years. Some translate the source almost literally, hieroglyphs beaded straight onto a skirt, a three-headed goddess reworked into a headpiece. Others just take the emotional shape of the story and rebuild it in fabric. All ten hold up as couture or ready-to-wear first and illustration second.
1. Daniel Roseberry's Inferno beasts for Schiaparelli
Daniel Roseberry built Schiaparelli's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023-24 collection around the opening canto of Dante's "Inferno," where a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf block the poet's path before he can begin his descent. Roseberry recreated the three animals as lifelike faux-taxidermy heads worked directly into couture garments, worn on the runway by Kylie Jenner and Naomi Campbell, and described the whole collection as "an homage to doubt." He was born in 1985 in Plano, Texas, spent over a decade at Thom Browne before Schiaparelli named him creative director in 2019, the first American ever to lead a French couture house, without formal couture training or fluent French. His debut collection showed just two months after he joined.
2. Kim Jones's Orlando for Fendi
Kim Jones's debut couture collection for Fendi, shown Spring/Summer 2021, was his first womenswear collection anywhere, and he built it around Virginia Woolf's gender-shifting, centuries-spanning novel "Orlando." He quoted the book directly in his notes, Orlando's line about clothes changing "our view of the world and the world's view of us," and paired masculine tailoring against diaphanous grey silk and damask-rose gowns, plunging necklines and heavy Fendi fur and beadwork standing in for the novel's shift across eras and genders. Jones was born in London in 1973, ran menswear at Louis Vuitton for seven years and Dior Homme for another seven, and holds an OBE and the French Legion of Honour. He led Fendi's womenswear and couture from 2020 to 2024.
3. Guo Pei's 1002 Nights
Guo Pei named her 2010 collection "1002 Nights," one night longer than "One Thousand and One Nights," the frame story in which Scheherazade tells the sultan a new tale every night to delay her own execution. Guo Pei has described the collection as being about the lies, betrayal and rebirth folded into that nightly act of survival, translated into floor-sweeping fur-trimmed trains, tiered metallic brocades and jeweled crowns built with the hand-embroidery techniques her Beijing atelier is known for. She was born in Beijing in 1967, designed costumes for the 2008 Olympics closing ceremony, and made the 25-kilogram yellow gown Rihanna wore to the 2015 Met Gala, roughly 50,000 hours of work. In 2016 she became the first Asian-born guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.
4. Zuhair Murad's ancient Egypt
Zuhair Murad's Spring 2020 Haute Couture collection drew directly on ancient Egyptian iconography, its most explicit pieces laid out like registers of tomb wall paintings: rows of hieroglyphic figures, a Tutankhamun-style pharaoh's mask, and a broad jeweled collar worked in sequins across the shoulders, all done in gold, lapis blue and carnelian red. Other looks translated the same vocabulary into evening dresses and gold laced sandals meant to evoke pharaonic footwear. Murad was born in Ras Baalbek, Lebanon, trained in Paris, opened his Beirut flagship in 1995 and has shown on the official Paris couture calendar since 2001. His gowns have gone to Priyanka Chopra's 2016 Oscars debut and Jennifer Lopez's 2024 premiere look for "Wicked."
5. Versace's Medusa
Versace's Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear show was Donatella Versace's tribute to her brother Gianni twenty years after his death, built around the house's Medusa emblem and its 1990s archive prints. Gianni chose the Gorgon of Greek mythology as the brand's symbol in the early 1980s, taking her from a Roman mosaic he'd seen growing up near Reggio Calabria, and explained the choice in 1981 as "aggressive and fatal, able to seduce you with a glance." The collection ran that same gold Barocco medallion print, framing a stylized Medusa head, across silk shirt sets, belt buckles and thigh-high boots, and closed with the supermodels who defined Gianni's own shows, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer among them, restaging his 1995 finale in gold mesh.
6. Simone Rocha's Irish folklore
Simone Rocha's Fall 2023 ready-to-wear collection was built around Lughnasadh, the ancient Irish harvest festival marking the start of autumn, one of four Gaelic seasonal fire festivals alongside Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane. She described it as "this kind of teenage folklore, but set today," rendering that harvest mood through pleated micro-skirts and puffed sleeves in metallic gold cloqué, cinched with trailing red satin ribbons at the throat, a recurring motif in her work. Rocha was born in Dublin in 1986 to designer John Rocha and worked in his studio from age thirteen. She earned her MA at Central Saint Martins, opened her first London store in 2015, and designed Billie Eilish's 2023 Met Gala look.
7. Rahul Mishra's Devi
Rahul Mishra's "Devi," shown at Paris Haute Couture Week, reimagines the apsaras and temple-guardian goddesses carved into India's ancient stone temples, figures that Mishra points out appear "barely clothed," with jewelry doing the work dress usually does. The collection answers that by wrapping bodies in sculptural girdles, armlets and stacked necklaces rendered in zardozi and dabka embroidery built up until the beadwork reads as carved basalt or bronze rather than fabric. Mishra was born in a village near Kanpur, India, in 1979, studied physics before switching to apparel design, and in 2014 became the first Indian designer to win the International Woolmark Prize and the first invited to show at Paris Couture Week.
8. Chopova Lowena's Bulgarian folk skirts
Chopova Lowena, the label founded by Bulgarian-British designer Emma Chopova and British designer Laura Lowena-Irons, builds its collections on Bulgarian folk costume, specifically the pleated, densely embroidered sukman-style skirts and apron textiles of traditional dress. Its signature piece is the carabiner skirt, a pleated folk skirt, often cut from repurposed deadstock textiles or vintage pillowcases, suspended from a belt with metal rock-climbing carabiners instead of a waistband. The designers call it "juxtaposing folklore and sportswear," and the garments are produced with a network of seamstresses in Bulgaria, framed as preserving traditional embroidery skills. Chopova and Lowena met while both completing their MAs at Central Saint Martins and were finalists for the 2020 LVMH Prize.
9. Georges Hobeika's Aphrodite
Georges Hobeika's Ready-to-Wear Spring 2024 collection, "Goddess of Love," was built around Aphrodite, with Hobeika citing Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," a female figure rising through the waves, as a direct reference. The house staged the show inside the ancient Roman temple complex at Baalbek, Lebanon, the first fashion label ever to show there, translating the myth into flowing ivory-and-silver gowns, crystal-beaded bustiers and oversized dimensional flowers built from iridescent sequined petals. Hobeika was born in 1962 in Baskinta, a village in the Lebanese mountains, originally studied civil engineering, and opened his first Beirut atelier in 1995 before debuting on the official Paris Haute Couture calendar in 2001, where he's shown every season since.
10. Anna Sui's Miss Marple
Anna Sui's Fall 2024 ready-to-wear collection reimagined Agatha Christie's amateur detective Miss Marple for the runway, staged as an immersive show inside Manhattan's Strand bookstore among its rare-book stacks. Christie's tweed-clad, Gladstone-bag-carrying village sleuth became vintage-inflected workwear: houndstooth and gingham shirting, tweed mini skirts and knee boots, argyle sweaters repeated in nearly every look, cameo brooches at the collar and floral tapestry handbags. Sui was born in Detroit in 1955, left Parsons in 1975 to work in the industry, and started her own label from her apartment in 1979 with 300 dollars in savings. Her 1991 runway debut featured Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, and she's since had solo museum retrospectives at the V&A and the Museum at FIT.
